We are a founder-led brand agency, and new business is critical to our journey, with everyone sharing responsibility for our success. But 2023 was a hard year for Keel for converting new business.
90% of our client portfolio is global so we tend to attract international opportunities but we’re equally keen to grow our UK portfolio.
Some pitches we lost in the final cut and the feedback was that it was purely a creative decision. Others were lost due to clients acquiring companies, as we were pitching, which became a distraction. And others we just lost because the client preferred another agency.
A lot of these pitches were in our control to change or switch up, but some aspects were outside of our control.
Notably all these opportunities were via outreach or networking as we looked to convert suspects to prospects to friends…but it was taking a lot of our scarce time and resources, and bottom line, we weren’t converting enough of them, so we had to jump out of the pond.
‘Eat, Sleep, Lead Gen, Repeat’ wasn’t working and the agency was feeling deflated with no progress. We needed to switch it up. Like most agencies, time was scarce due to our ongoing commitments, working on our existing client’s business. We had to use our limited time on new business, in the most efficient way possible, to give us the highest return on this critical investment.
So, we decided to focus solely on our clients and their referral networks. We have fantastic client relationships and quickly recognised that we hadn’t clearly articulated our offer, where we were looking to grow, our point of difference, and the value we can offer through our IP.
This insight led to the development of a summary of our “Keel growth journey” on–a-page, which highlighted where we wanted to grow, the mindset of the clients we wanted to work with, as well describing our agency proposition and how that creates value for brands.
Taking a step back like this takes time but if you set up the framework to deliver a client referral strategy, you can execute it much more effectively. And the motivation for us was that we were much happier spending time investing in this type of prospecting than throwing mud at the wall with lead generation outbound campaigns.
We identified eight key clients and reviewed their LinkedIn networks to see who they were hanging out with, whilst also commenting on posts/increasing engagement. We then mapped these prospects to industry verticals, job title, industry experience etc, to ensure they aligned with our ideal client profile.
At this point we approached our clients. We explained our growth journey and how we value our clients in helping us build our agency to the next level. We took them through the Keel growth journey one-pager, and explained how they could use that to engage with the prospects we had identified. The good news was that they all wanted to help.
This approach directly resulted in two new international client wins, in the first three months of our client referral strategy being in place. Moreover, these new clients are a brilliant fit with our ideal client profile, and we are creating deep strategy and rich creative for them, which of course is highly motivating and rewarding across the agency.
On reflection, for us, we had too many plates to keep spinning in new business, from thought leadership to lead gen, to networking, to events. And if you are sub 30 people agency like us, you can’t do it all.